Brown alumnus Josh Marshall is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Talking Points Memo (TPM), an independent online news and commentary agency founded in 2000. Marshall expanded the staff and his investigatory reporting unit, and led the team that broke the U.S. Attorney firing scandal in the Bush administration during 2006-7. For its reporting, TPM became the first online blogging site to win a George Polk Award in 2008. Marshall spoke with BPR’s Ben Wofford.
Brown Political Review: One of the interesting things about TPM is the fusion between more conventional news reporting and a blog-style commentary. Did you foresee TPM taking that news-oriented tack when you started out?
Josh Marshall: I came into TPM as a reporter, so what I was always interested in from the very beginning was the kind of writing that involved a lot of reporting. When I started expanding the site after 2005, we started building more of a news operation. The idea was to have that same original vision but with a lot more reporting capacity.
BPR: It seems like there’s a never-ending trend in the decentralizing of news thanks to the Internet. What does the relationship between mainstream media and web media mean for the years ahead?
JM: This is the first cycle where it’s a little less clear to me what is mainstream media and what is new media, or whatever you want to call it. Obviously it’s been a slow process over a decade or more. But to me this is the first cycle where it’s not clear that we have the mainstream news guiding the conversation with new media upstarts only jumping in, disrupting and grabbing hold of things. It’s kind of mixed.
BPR: One criticism is that the rise of Internet news allows citizens to retreat into their own world. Do you buy that premise? Is the Internet a main culprit for why politics have taken such a vicious turn?
JM: I definitely don’t think that’s why it’s taken such a vicious turn. I think the roots are much more organic in society itself. I do think that sort of segmentation has its downsides. But there’s another big downside, too. Everything about old media and mainstream media organizations is based on monopolies. In some cases, they were tri-opolies—like the national network news—but from the editorial side and on the economic side, the big thing about the major metropolitan newspapers is that they had a monopoly not just on the news in a particular area, but on the distribution of paid information of advertising in a particular area. So [when] people talk about the decline of newspapers and newspapers going under, all of that is a loss of monopoly power.
People talk about what a great thing it was listening to Walter Cronkite each night giving a standardized take on what the news was and what the “truth” was. But that’s not necessarily such a great thing. There were a lot of rather profound gatekeepers and insularity that defined what news is. So yes, there’s a lot of potential downsides to what we have right now, but it’s also a lot more porous, a lot more voices.
On the point about whether it’s behind polarization: again, I don’t think that’s the case. I think the country is polarized because you have deep, deep divisions in the country. But that’s because there are real things being debated in the country. That’s not to say that there’s not some coarsening of the dialogue because of the web, but I don’t think it’s the main cause.
BPR: What do you think the Republican Party looks like in twenty years? More or less to the right?
JM: That’s a good question. Right now the Republican Party is doubling down on a shrinking part of the electorate that happens to be a high voting part of the electorate: white people and older people. At a certain point, there aren’t going to be enough of those people to not take more cognizance of the demographic trends that are changing the country. That would sort of suggest that they’ll need to, if not move to the center, at least start selling a political message that is a little more relevant to non-whites and people under 30 or 35. So I guess that would mean it’s less hard right than it is now. Whether it actually is that way, I have no idea.
BPR: So the Todd Akin comment, Medicare vouchers, anti-immigrant tone, that was us watching the GOP in the last throes of a major phase?
JM: Possibly. Again, I think that they are trying to intensify support with a shrinking part of the electorate. They’re not going to go out of existence, or blow up or anything like that. But there’s got to be some reinvigorating around a policy outlook that doesn’t shut them out with non-white voters.
BPR: You’ve indicated on TPM that expectations for Obama might have been set too high. Don’t you think the President also bears some culpability? Didn’t he partially set liberals up for disappointment? And are you disappointed by Obama?
JM: It’s not even a question I think in terms of. I never thought he was going to transform what American politics was about, and I said that during the 2008 election. Politics isn’t about feeling good. Politics isn’t about having warm, cuddly feelings. It’s an inherently acrimonious process, about directing the country in ways that you think are useful for the common good. I don’t have a great deal of sympathy if people thought that gravity was not going to be in effect starting in 2009. I see a President who has done a lot of very positive things, and I also think he’s made some key mistakes. But the overwhelming reality is that the entire global economy collapsed at the beginning of his administration. That’s just the reality.
BPR: You’re not on the record very much about your time at Brown. What was your experience like? And did it help you in terms of your path to journalism?
JM: I think it helped me a lot. In terms of just being a more grounded thinker, it’s helped me a huge amount. Having an organized discipline of thinking, a method in which you work, is something that most journalists don’t have. Whether or not anyone who reads me or hired me cares is a totally different story. But I think it was time well spent. I loved Providence. I loved Brown, and I miss it.
BPR: What’s your advice to students thinking about political journalism?
JM: Go out and get a job and start getting clips. I know it seems kind of obvious, but journalism is a very entrepreneurial world now, and you really want to get out, find things you care about and know about, and start really learning them and writing about them and developing a voice. There’s a lot of superficial bullshit out there, as there always is in journalism, and I would be less concerned with New York Times versus TPM versus Buzzfeed versus Huffington Post—it probably doesn’t matter. I think you go out and find a place where someone will let you do the basic craft. You work on it and find good mentors, and you just do it.